Tag Archives: creative writing

Wild & Improbable Tales – Silent Melody

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Her hands fluttered at her chest; a delicate, hummingbird movement that those who didn’t know her would think showed nervousness. But he did know her. He watched her fingers beat the rhythm of an unheard melody and knew that her mind was a riot of harmonies and movement, not fear. His eyes followed the gentle tightening of lean muscle under her lace sleeve. At that moment, he wanted nothing more than to hold her in the circle of his arms and be led by her music. But he waited.

Eventually, her distant gaze cleared and sought his face, a flush of anticipation rising on her cheek.

She reached for him, excited whispers of what had thrummed in her veins spilling from her lips to his waiting ear. The music had spoken to her, as it always did, but this piece was more beautiful than any before: it’s staves of clouds and starlight, it’s notes undulating birdsong and the rush water falling through rainbows.

She stepped into his waiting embrace and, with a step as light as the brush of a butterfly’s wing, their bodies moving together as one, they began to dance, out into the waiting twilit sky.

 

 

“You’re a storyteller. Dream up something wild and improbable,” she pleaded. “Something beautiful and full of monsters.”

Strange The Dreamer by Laini Taylor

Inspired by Erin Morgenstern’s Flax-Golden Tales, I have decided to embark on my own creative writing blog series, “Wild & Improbable Tales”, as a way to write more freely and more frequently. At least once a week, I will choose a card at random from The School Of Life‘s ‘Small Pleasures’ box and use the image and/or writing on the back to inspire a short piece of creative writing. I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments.

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Wild & Improbable Tales – Paradise In Flames

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Stepping out into the blistering heat, they walked with heads down, oblivious to their fellow travellers. They watched their steps, trying to avoid tripping and falling to the scorching ground below, and so did not see the creature that reared above them, cloaked in the poisonous fumes of their journey.

Heat rippled through the air. Shimmering waves of boiling atmosphere distorting the landscape until it seemed to shift and heave around them: almost alive.

They had dreamed of basking in the sun. After all, they deserved paradise. They deserved that long rest, surrounded by beauty, every need and want met.

Turning up their faces to absorb the warmth of the sun, they didn’t realise that the flames were all around them. They smiled, at first. And then they burned.

“You’re a storyteller. Dream up something wild and improbable,” she pleaded. “Something beautiful and full of monsters.”

Strange The Dreamer by Laini Taylor

Inspired by Erin Morgenstern’s Flax-Golden Tales, I have decided to embark on my own creative writing blog series, “Wild & Improbable Tales”, as a way to write more freely and more frequently. At least once a week, I will choose a card at random from The School Of Life‘s ‘Small Pleasures’ box and use the image and/or writing on the back to inspire a short piece of creative writing. I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments.

Wild & Improbable Tales – Celestial Tears

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The stars were lonely. For a millennia they had watched life blossom over the planet below and yearned to be a part of it: longed to immerse themselves in the warmth blanketing that lump of rock, rather than hanging in beautiful, cold isolation in the emptiness above.

Humanity gazed up and admired the gentle twinkling bestowed by the stars, not realising those endless flickering lights were celestial tears blinked from heavenly eyes. From Earth’s vantage, the stars were in good company, nestled amongst each other in glittering clusters, surrounded by the reflected glow of their orbiting planets. They could not comprehend the distance from one distant sun to another. Nor could they understand the sense of desolation that such loneliness brought.

Eventually, that stars could take their exile no longer.

They stole down to Earth on sunbeams and disguised themselves in the world. Dust motes glowing in morning light; that distinctive twinkle in a mischievous child’s eye; the sparkling of frost on a winter’s evening; the shimmer of moonlight on still water.

The stars live among us now, and are happy.

“You’re a storyteller. Dream up something wild and improbable,” she pleaded. “Something beautiful and full of monsters.”

Strange The Dreamer by Laini Taylor

Inspired by Erin Morgenstern’s Flax-Golden Tales, I have decided to embark on my own creative writing blog series, “Wild & Improbable Tales”, as a way to write more freely and more frequently. At least once a week, I will choose a card at random from The School Of Life‘s ‘Small Pleasures’ box and use the image and/or writing on the back to inspire a short piece of creative writing. I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments.

Wild & Improbable Tales – Suit Up

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No one saw it for what it really was. When they saw him striding the halls and directing their meetings, they assumed the freshly pressed suit and perfectly knotted tie were simply business dress.

They didn’t know that, when he got home at night and loosened that restrictive strip of fabric, the rest of him unraveled with it. They didn’t know that their confident, assertive leader shed his stoicism with the layers of expensive tailoring. They didn’t know the vulnerability of his true self; that whilst his head may be in the game his heart was in the clouds, yearning for the life of a wandering dreamer.

The daily struggle between expectation and longing was always hidden behind buzz words and neatly ordered spreadsheets. Until he was alone and free to dream, to marvel, to create, or sometimes to simply fall apart, as the world would never allow him to do in sight of his troops. The dreaming and marvelling and creating and falling took him to beautiful and terrible places, where he meandered all the night, until it was time to suit up his armour again. For he went not to work but to war.

If only they had known, they would have unraveled with him.

Wild & Improbable Tales – Beautiful Misfits

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The trees thought they had seen it all. Their collective consciousness had watched the world through its centuries of seasons; observed the heavens wheeling overhead in arcs of millennia-old starlight and moonshine; held their steady gaze when dragons walked the earth; stood tall through all the ages and beheld the emergence of humanity. 

They never watched people too closely as they seemed just another beast whose time had come to rule. More destructive than most who had gone before but the trees knew their own deep-rooted power, and that they would cover the earth once more beyond the age of man. So they simply watched, never really seeing.

One day – a day just like any other – a small group came within the bounds of an ancient forest and set about a picnic. As the trees watched on, they began to realise there was more to this little cluster of humanity than met the eye: the one in the straw hat with a wide smile had onyx tears etched high on their right cheekbone; the one with a sweater slung carelessly about their shoulders moved with such weight and gravitas that the trees themselves seemed drawn towards that strange, charismatic gravity; the one who pulled faces and laughed with abandon had, not hair flowing from their scalp but fine strands of poetry, tied back at the nape of their neck. And then there was the child. The child who stood, with balloon in hand, unseen by the rest of the party, and cast a penetrating stare at the trunk of a nearby oak.

That stare sank down into the well of the world and all of nature sighed to be seen.

It was only the briefest moment in time, but when that motley crew packed up the remnants of their meal and headed back out from beneath the low-hanging boughs, the trees strained to follow and, as one, agreed: what a beautiful bunch of misfits they were.

 

“You’re a storyteller. Dream up something wild and improbable,” she pleaded. “Something beautiful and full of monsters.”

Strange The Dreamer by Laini Taylor

Inspired by Erin Morgenstern’s Flax-Golden Tales, I have decided to embark on my own creative writing blog series, “Wild & Improbable Tales”, as a way to write more freely and more frequently. At least once a week, I will choose a card at random from The School Of Life‘s ‘Small Pleasures’ box and use the image and/or writing on the back to inspire a short piece of creative writing. I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments.

Wild & Improbable Tales -Whispers In The Dark

Posted on by under Wild and Improbable Tales, Written word

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Cocooned in sleepy warmth, they lay in midnight’s silence, oblivious to the world.

Blankets a tangle around entwined limbs; heads resting close on pillows; fingers unconsciously seeking skin, lost in wonderment, their whispered voices held the cadence of the lapping tide and the hush of a shooting star.

What they spoke of did not matter: hopes and fears; the mundane and the magical; gods and monsters. All that mattered was that moment in which the universe belonged to them alone.

With eyes only for each other, they saw nothing beyond their own slowly curving smiles. They did not see the words they breathed take flight in the night. Did not see their dreams light up and dance above their heads like fireflies. Did not see those little specs of luminescence weave together and hold back the shadows.

The moon outside the window gazed down in awed affection, the tiniest hint of envy in his silvered rays. What a wondrous thing: to build a world from whispers in the dark.

 

 

“You’re a storyteller. Dream up something wild and improbable,” she pleaded. “Something beautiful and full of monsters.”

Strange The Dreamer by Laini Taylor

Inspired by Erin Morgenstern’s Flax-Golden Tales, I have decided to embark on my own creative writing blog series, “Wild & Improbable Tales”, as a way to write more freely and more frequently. At least once a week, I will choose a card at random from The School Of Life‘s ‘Small Pleasures’ box and use the image and/or writing on the back to inspire a short piece of creative writing. I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments.